Due to their strong emphasis on safety, reliability and quality, the development of embedded and critical systems is based since the beginning of its history on numerous software tools. But while the life cycle of critical and embedded systems goes from 10 years up to 80 years in the case of aircrafts, the tools frequently become obsolete or disappear after less than 15, 10 or even 5 years. Polarsys has been created to take advantage of open source to bridge this gap and to foster innovation in this domain. The mission of the Polarsys Top-Level Project is therefore to host the open source assets of Polarsys.

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Due to its strong emphasis on safety, reliability and quality, the development of embedded and critical systems is based since the beginning of its history on numerous software tools. But while the life cycle of critical and embedded systems goes from 10 years up to 80 years in the case of aircrafts, the tools frequently become obsolete or disappear after less than 15, 10 or even 5 years. Polarsys has been created to take advantage of open source to bridge this gap and to foster innovation in this domain. The mission of the Polarsys Top-Level Project is therefore to host the open source assets of Polarsys.

Of course, the aim is not to gather any new technologies that could be eventually applied to Embedded System design and development. The components with a larger audience than only critical and embedded systems will instead be hosted by a most relevant community. Good examples of this situation are some components from the [http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/ Eclipse Modeling Project] like [http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/papyrus/ MDT Papyrus], [http://www.eclipse.org/acceleo/ Acceleo] or other development tools like the [http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ CDT]. They will neither move nor be duplicated into the Polarsys Top-Level Project, but some complementary assets (specific functional tests, extra documentation, etc.) may nevertheless be hosted locally if needed.

Of course, the aim is not to gather any new technologies that could be eventually applied to Embedded System design and development. The components with a larger audience than only critical and embedded systems will instead be hosted by a most relevant community. Good examples of this situation are some components from the [http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/ Eclipse Modeling Project] like [http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/papyrus/ MDT Papyrus], [http://www.eclipse.org/acceleo/ Acceleo] or other development tools like the [http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ CDT]. They will neither move nor be duplicated into the Polarsys Top-Level Project, but some complementary assets (specific functional tests, extra documentation, etc.) may nevertheless be hosted locally if needed.

Contents

DRAFT

Overview

The Polarsys Top Level Project (the "Polarsys Project") is an open source software development project hosted by the Industry Working Group Polarsys dedicated to providing a robust, full-featured, industrial-quality, and freely available set of development tools addressing specific needs of critical and embedded systems.

This document describes the mission, scope, and organization of this Top Level Project and its constituent Projects, and roles and responsibilities of the participants.

Mission

Due to its strong emphasis on safety, reliability and quality, the development of embedded and critical systems is based since the beginning of its history on numerous software tools. But while the life cycle of critical and embedded systems goes from 10 years up to 80 years in the case of aircrafts, the tools frequently become obsolete or disappear after less than 15, 10 or even 5 years. Polarsys has been created to take advantage of open source to bridge this gap and to foster innovation in this domain. The mission of the Polarsys Top-Level Project is therefore to host the open source assets of Polarsys.

Of course, the aim is not to gather any new technologies that could be eventually applied to Embedded System design and development. The components with a larger audience than only critical and embedded systems will instead be hosted by a most relevant community. Good examples of this situation are some components from the Eclipse Modeling Project like MDT Papyrus, Acceleo or other development tools like the CDT. They will neither move nor be duplicated into the Polarsys Top-Level Project, but some complementary assets (specific functional tests, extra documentation, etc.) may nevertheless be hosted locally if needed.

It is noteworthy that the projects hosted by this Top-Level Project have a few specific features:

those projects can be licensed under either the EPL or any other licenses approved by the Industry Working Group and the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors, such as BSD-like licenses and LGPL. See the Licensing section for more information.

while most projects will probably publish Eclipse features, some others may produce other kinds of component like stand-alone tools and servers.

Scope

The Polarsys projects and components are organized according to a two-level architecture.

Companies or communities of interest can complete the Polarsys Engineering Level by a Business Level composed of business-specific components.

Polarsys adds a cross level:

Polarsys Service Framework (PSF): this level contains all the projects and components to develop Polarsys services, such as release engineering for building Polarsys components or the definition of the Polarsys quality kits. This level is positioned upon the Eclipse infrastructure which provides services standard or adapted to Polarsys (e.g., Hudson/Buckminister for continuous integration, Bugzilla for change management, file download, mailing list).

Project Management Committee

The Projects under this Charter are managed by a group known as the Project Management Committee (the "PMC"). The PMC's duties are described in "Project Management Committee" of the Eclipse Standard Top-Level Chapter and in "4.6 Leaders" of the Eclipse Development Process.

Beyond these general duties, the Polarsys Top-Level Project Lead(s) is responsible for applying Polarsys Steering Committee's and Architecture Committee's decisions and recommendations about the organization and operations of the Top-Level Project. The Polarsys Top-Level Project Lead(s) also report(s) to them.

Project Planning Committees

Polarsys aims at setting up a strong coordination and collaboration between the various actors of its open source projects. Beyond the usual PMC coordinating the developers, a new mean associating not only the development teams, but also other stakeholders like industrial users or involved researchers is therefore needed: this is the role of the PPC, as defined in the Polarsys charter, section Project Planning Committees.

But in no way PPC replace PMC:

PMC are connected to one Project or to one Top-Level Project, while PPC are most of the time managing a complete functional stack (e.g. a PPC can take care of a specific modeling stack covered by several PMC).

PMC are involved in the day to day management of projects, and PPC pay attention to more abstract concerns, like gathering various user's needs (functional needs, but also release deadlines and contents), defining medium/long term development plans, discussing innovation, maintenance, efforts and means, etc.

PPC are a privileged mean for developers to get return of experience from their users. Of course, the involved Project lead(s) are permanent guests in PPC meetings.

Projects

Project Organization

Infrastructure

The PMC works with the EMO to ensure the required infrastructure for the Project. The Project infrastructure will include, at minimum: Bug Database - Bugzilla database for tracking bugs and feature requests. Source Repository -- One or more CVS repositories containing all the software for the Projects. Website - A website will contain information about the Project, including documentation, reports and papers, courseware, downloads of releases, and this Charter. General Mailing List - Mailing list for discussions pertaining to the Project as a whole or that cross Projects. This mailing list is open to the public. Project Mailing Lists - Mailing list for technical discussions related to the Project. This mailing list is open to the public. Component Mailing Lists - Mailing list for technical discussions related to the component. This mailing list is open to the public. Newsgroups - Newsgroups where users, developers, and committers can interact regarding general questions and issues about the project. The newsgroup is open to the public.

Licensing

All contributions to Projects under this Charter must be done according to the Eclipse Foundation's IP due diligence process in order to provide clean open source software released under EPL or any other licenses approved by the IWG Steering Committee and the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors.

As of this proposal, the list of accepted licenses includes the EPL, BSD-like licenses like the Apache License and the LGPL.

Glossary of Terms

CDT Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling

EMO Eclipse Management Organisation

IWG Industry Working Group

PMC Project Management Committee

PSF Polarsys Service Framework

PSC Polarsys Sterring Committee

PTL Polarsys Technology Level : projects and components with a technical scope, such as transformation technology or interoperability.

Other Terms

This Charter inherits all terms not otherwise defined herein from the Eclipse Standard Charter v1.1. This includes, but is not limited to, sections on the Program Management Committee, Roles, Project Organization, The Development Process, and Licensing.